Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Review: Sapphic Psychosexual Meta Slasher is a Dazzling Achievement in Horror Cinema
Cannes Film Festival: Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson lead the new film from I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun
by Alex Kaan 14 May 2026
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With Creepypasta-esque indie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and haunting trans allegory I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun has established themself as a budding auteur specialising in sombre psychological horror. If there is a clear through line between those first two features, their third film—a queer slasher with a mouthful of a title—emphatically breaks the mould. A psychosexual soup of offbeat comedy, gory eroticism, and academic deconstructions of the slasher subgenre, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a genre-bending spectacle and a testament to the power of independent queer film. It’s quite frankly like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), an indie queer filmmaker and “Sundance wunderkind” whose previous work, a re-telling of Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain, has given her the keys to a reboot of Camp Miasma, a rival slasher franchise to Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Kris, who uses she/they pronouns, believes that she got the job precisely because of her queerness—as the opening credits (filled with Camp Miasma memorabilia and news clippings) reveal, the killer’s problematic trans origin story has contributed to the property becoming regarded as “zombie IP”. Despite that reputation, and the knowledge that she’s been hired to save face, Kris is a mega-fan: she even describes the original as her queer awakening.
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As a research trip, the 29-year-old director travels up to Camp Tivoli, where the series was filmed and where its original final girl, Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), now lives as a recluse. With the lake frozen over and the snowy woodland portrayed through gorgeously painted backdrops, it’s a hazy dream of a setting, and an ideal atmosphere for Kris and Billy to develop a deep bond as they rewatch scenes from a print of the first movie—which the viewer gets to enjoy along with them—and open up to each other about a taboo pleasure that they each find in the low-brow, overtly problematic realm of slasher cinema.
Like Friday the 13th filtered through Cronenberg’s Crash, Camp Miasma is at its heart a film about alternative intimacy. Playing the two leads caught in a bloody, tender romance, Hannah Einbinder is superb as an awkward, sexually stunted young filmmaker, while Gillian Anderson enchants as a slinky, glamorous recluse with a southern accent. Their scintillating, quirky chemistry is thoroughly earned as Billy eases Kris into confronting her uncomfortable relationship with sex. There’s also plenty of moments for Schoenbrun’s wry humour and the leading duo’s comedic timing to shine—this is more a comedy drama than a horror film—like when Kris explains they’re polyamorous and Billy tries to comprehend the practice (“Like cheating?” she asks earnestly).
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Heartfelt, demented, and endearingly weird, Camp Miasma is the kind of film that interrupts its climax with a hilarious Sade needle-drop—whose answer to Jason Voorhees is a non-binary personification of the orgasm played by Jack Haven, and whose idea of cinematic foreplay is close-ups of Kentucky Fried Chicken in dipping sauce. Meanwhile, Eva Victor plays a mohawk-sporting punk DJ, Jasmin Savoy Brown cameos as Kris’ poly lover who seems more interested in another partner, and SNL’s Sarah Sherman charms as a brash, squash-playing agent. There’s no overstating just how much Schoenbrun swings for the fences. Add in the heady dialogue, informed by academic horror literature and criticism (from Carol J. Clover’s 1992 classic Men, Women, and Chain Saws to Willow Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner’s Corpses, Fools, and Monsters), and the film becomes near impossible to categorise. Like its protagonist, Camp Miasma is sometimes too cerebral and tonally ambitious for its own good, but the odd moment of whiplash is worth it in the name of Schoenbrun’s uncompromised vision.
A lush, erotic meta slasher anchored by the stellar pairing of Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an utterly singular spectacle that cements Jane Schoenbrun as a peerless horror auteur.